wide area application service (storage concept) (WAAS)

Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a Cisco concept for connecting decentralized sites to a central host. With the WAAS concept, branch offices can be connected to hosted applications, and employees in branch offices have seamless access to central host applications.

The WAAS concept is similar in approach to application service providing( ASP), with the Cisco approach designed to provide functional and viable solutions.

With WAAS technology, users can simultaneously access several thousand remote sites and realize up to four million TCP connections. The WAAS service uses several basic technologies for protocol optimization, caching, local print server support, and network layer optimization. As an interface, the WAAS service provides Common Internet File System( CIFS) in the branch offices.